The Best Things I Never Wrote: Quote of the Day, #5

Marcus Berkmann on books of quotations …

“Surely no one buys a book of quotations when sober.”

Marcus Berkmann in The Spectator www.spectator.co.uk, Dec. 16-23, 2006. This comment appeared a dual review of The Yale Book of Quotations (Yale, 2006), edited by Fred R. Shapiro, and The Times Quotations (Collins, 2006), edited by Philip Howard.

Comment by Janice Harayda:

I don’t agree with this, and we aren’t supposed to agree. Berkmann is writing with tongue-in-cheek here. I’m posting his comment because it suggests a difference betwen British and American book reviews. British critics take more risks, write in a more conversational tone, and give their readers more credit for having a sense of humor than their American counterparts do. Berkmann made this comment in The Spectactor, a conservative weekly. Can you imagine a liberal publication like The New York Times Book Review publishing a remark like this? So which publication, we might ask, is more “conservative”?

One-Minute Book Reviews reflects, in part, my admiration for the British tradition of publishing reviews that are witty, spirited, and intelligent. I agree with the comment by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair, that the main problem with American journalism isn’t that it is uninformative but that it is dull. And I try to offer an antidote on One-Minute Book Reviews by writing reviews that you will enjoy even when you disagree with them.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

The Delete Key Awards Are Coming … Beware the Ides of March!

Julius Caesar was assassinated on March 15. The Delete Key Awards recognize authors are trying to assassinate the English language.

One-Minute Book Reviews is the home of the Delete Key Awards, which recognize the worst writing published in books in the preceding year.

In February Janice Harayda will announce the short list for the 2007 Delete Key Awards, which will go to authors who have written some of the worst lines of 2006. Visitors to One-Minute Book Reviews will have an opportunity to comment on the finalists, and the winner will be announced on March 15.

Please bookmark www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com or subscribe to the RSS feed to avoid missing announcements about these awards. To nominate your candidates for a Delete Key award, leave a comment on this site.

This is the first year that the Delete Key Awards are being given out, and many people don’t know about them. Please help to spread the word, if you can, by commenting on them on your blog or by forwarding this post or a link to this site to others, especially to literary bloggers and people in the media and publishing. Thank you!

(c) Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Stanley Alpert’s 25 Hours in Hell With a Turkey Sandwich

You think your last birthday was a bad?

The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival. By Stanley N. Alpert. Putnam’s, 306 pp., $24.95.

By Janice Harayda

January used to be the low season in publishing, a time when firms released titles that weren’t sexy enough to compete with gift or beach books. No more, and anybody who wants proof needs only to pick up The Birthday Party. To say that this terrific book tells the true story of a New York stick-up gone haywire is like saying that Psycho is about a motel with an eccentric owner.

On the night before his 38th birthday, Stanley Alpert was abducted on a Manhattan street by thugs who expected to release him after using his ATM card at a nearby machine. The kidnappers changed their plans after learning that Alpert, then a federal prosecutor, had $110,000 in a savings account. With a gang-that-couldn’t- shoot-straight ineptitude, they kept him blindfolded for 25 hours in their car and a Brooklyn tenement as they tried to figure out how to grab more of his cash.

Alpert tried to humanize himself with his captors by tactics such as joking and giving them legal advice. He told the ringleader, who couldn’t fathom why he was single: “You should talk to my parents. They’re wondering, too.” But he had his limits. He turned down marijuana, sex with a hooker who helped keep an eye on him, and food (which he was afraid was drugged) except for a turkey sandwich, Peach Snapple, an Welch’s grape juice. Alpert kept his cool partly by memorizing clues to his captors’ identities that he hoped would help to put them away if he survived. And his strategies brought savory rewards when law-enforcement officials began hunting for the crew after his release.

We have to take Alpert’s word for much of this. But most of the story rings true, although his captors at times use oddly formal expressions such as “cellular phone” and his account of his legal career makes him sound like the Batman of environmental law. Alpert has no answer for his own question: “So why did God decide to keep me alive?” But on the evidence of this book, you might conclude that God just likes good writers.

Best line: When Alpert was missing and feared dead, a friend theorized that his disappearance might involve his investigation of a polluter with possible mob ties. An FBI agent dismissed the idea, believing the Mafia wouldn’t get worked up over an environmental issue: “Technically, dumping the guy in concrete shoes in the East River was a Clean Water Act violation, but who cared?”

Worst line: Alpert uses the redundant “PIN number” at least three times. He also writes of an “ATM cash machine.”

Recommended if … you’re hungry for manna for true crime fans or liked Boss of Bosses: The FBI and Paul Castellano, the true story of the government’s effort to bring down the Gambino crime family.

Editor: Neil Nyren

Published: January 2007

Furthermore: A reading group guide to The Birthday Party was posted on Feb. 4 and is archived with the February posts and in the “Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guides” category on this blog.

Links: Alpert has a good blog on Amazon.com that includes dates of his future appearances www.amazon.com.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

The Best Things I Never Wrote: Quote of the Day, #4

Donald M. Murray on the importance of a writer’s voice …

“Voice allows the reader to hear an individual human being speak from the page. Good writing always has a strong and appropriate voice. Voice is the quality, more than any other, that allows us to recognize exceptional potential in a beginning writer; voice is the quality, more than any other, that allows us to recognize excellent writing. We respond to voice when we hear it. Voice gives the text individuality, energy, concern.

“Voice is, of course, closely allied to style or tone, but I prefer the term ‘voice’ for it seems more accurate and more helpful for the beginner. However we discuss style, it seems to get related to fashion. Style sounds like something you buy off the shelf. It is made by someone else and changes with the season. The term ‘style’ encourages the misconception that writing is inherently dishonest, that the writer has to say what someone else wants the writer to say in manner appropriate to someone else. But good writing is honest – honest in what is said and how it is said.”

Donald M. Murray in A Writer Teaches Writing: Revised Second Edition (Heinle, 2004). An appreciation of Murray, who died in December, was posted on this blog on January 1, 2007, and is archived with the posts for that month.

Julia Hansen Tries the World’s Most Bizarre Method of Quitting Smoking: Books I Didn’t Finish, #4

Can I bum a radiator and 72-foot chain from you?

Title: A Life in Smoke: A Memoir. By Julia Hansen. Free Press, 304 pp., $24.

What it is: The true story of a former editor for Playgirl who tried to quit smoking by shackling herself to a radiator with a 72-foot steel chain from Home Depot that enabled her to reach to her computer but not stores that sold cigarettes.

Where I stopped reading: I read the first and last chapters and skimmed about half of the rest.

Why I stopped: Hansen describes herself accurately as a “competent writer … but not a brilliant one.” David Sedaris might have been able to pull off chaining himself to a radiator for a week and writing about it. But Hansen wasn’t funny or perceptive to hold my interest (although, in addition to working for Playgirl, she’s edited health books). It didn’t help that her book had pages of cloying, italicized, present-tense passages that broke her momentum. Her technique also raised questions of motive: Did she really chain herself to a radiator because she thought it would be the best way to quit smoking … or because she thought it would be the best way to get a lot of attention for her book on YouTube and elsewhere?

Editor: Liz Stein

Caveat reader: These comments are based on the advance readers’ edition. Some material in the finished book may differ slightly.

Published: November 2006

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

The Best Things I Never Wrote: Quote of the Day, #3

Anatole Broyard on nostalgia in American literature …

“It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.”

Anatole Broyard in “Mulchpile to Megalopolis,” which appeared in Aroused by Books (New York: Random House, 1974), a collection of book reviews that originally appeared in the New York Times from 1971–1973 when he was a staff critic.

Comment by Janice Harayda:

Broyard wrote this before the boom in what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography,” or biography and autobiography that focus on the sordid. Do you think his comment is still true of some American writers? If so, whom?

Kate DiCamillo’s Allegory of Christian Faith and Resurrection

Did the crucifixion of a rabbit keep her from winning another Newbery Medal?

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. By Kate DiCamillo. Illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. Candlewick, 200 pp., $18.99. Ages 7 and up.

By Janice Harayda

Edward Tulane spends “40 days and 40 nights” in a wilderness, is nailed to a cross, dies after a shared meal, and is resurrected and reunited with a parent figure. Sound like anybody you’ve heard of?

How about if I added that Edward is a rabbit, a symbol of Easter? And that he is loved by a girl named Maggie, which can be a nickname for Magdalene?

That’s right. Edward Tulane is a symbol of Christ, his story is a Passion narrative, and this novel is an allegory of Christian faith and resurrection.

If you’ve followed the publicity for The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, you may have heard denials of all this. So here are a couple of facts:

1) Anyone who has a financial stake in this novel may have to deny its religious motifs, even though the book includes a striking full-page picture of Edward’s crucifixion. DiCamillo won the Newbery Medal for The Tale of Despereaux, and the award helped to make her books among the most popular in American schools. The Christian imagery in The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane may have cost DiCamillo this year’s Newbery Medal, which the American Library Assocation awarded Monday to The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. A blunt acknowledgment that Edward is a Jesus figure might also keep the book off school reading lists.

2) The religious themes in the book do not appear once or twice or in ways that might have been accidental. They appear in the title, the artwork, and throughout the story. DiCamillo is too careful a writer to insert such motifs casually, which would violate the reader’s trust and well-established dramatic principles. At the end of this review are some lines that are identical or closely parallel to lines in the Bible. In DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie, the main character’s father was a preacher.

Children can enjoy The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane without understanding its religious themes just as adults can love Animal Farm without realizing that it is an allegory for Stalinism. But some children will sense that DiCamillo’s book has more than one level of meaning. To deny this could undermine their confidence in their ability to make intelligent, multi-layered judgments about books. All children benefit from learning to grasp a story on more than one level. DiCamillo has given them a chance to do this in a moving and suspenseful novel, beautifully illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. Children of any faith can enjoy its story. How unfortunate if the novel were kept out of schools because it might help them appreciate the many layers of meaning that a good book can have.

These are three of many passages in The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane that have parallels in the Bible:

DiCamillo’s lines appear below in a Roman font. The parallel lines from the King James Version appear in bold.

Edward begins his journey by leaving “a house on Egypt Street” where he is in bondage to his inability to love. “Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage …” Exodus 13:13

Edward spends “40 days and 40 nights” in a garbage dump surrounded by rotting food. “… he had fasted for 40 days and 40 nights …” Matthew 4:2 Also: “I will cause it to rain upon the earth for 40 days and 40 nights.” Genesis 7:4

A shopkeeper tells Edward: “I brought you back from the world of the dead.” “… he rose from the dead.” Acts 10:34

Many names in the book also have religious connotations. They include those of three female characters: Abilene (once a region of the Holy Land), Natalie (which means “birth of the Lord”); and Maggie (often a nickname for Magdalene).

Published: February 2006

Furthermore: See the Feb. 10, 2007, post on this blog for a review of DiCamillo’s “Mercy Watson” series for beginning readers, or younger children than The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.

Links: www.edwardtulane.com and www.katedicamillo.com

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

One-Minute Book Reviews is an independent literary blog created by Janice Harayda, who has been a book columnist for Glamour, book editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. This site posts a new review of a book for children or teenagers every Saturday. To avoid missing these reviews, please bookmark www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com. Please visit http://www.janiceharayda.com for information about the author’s comic novels.

One of the Most Talked-About Children’s Books of the Year, ‘The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,’ Tomorrow on One-Minute Book Reviews

Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane was one of the most talked about books of 2oo6. Janice Harayda reviews this novel for ages 7 and up tomorrow in the Saturday Children’s Corner on One-Minute Book Reviews. She will also look at DiCamillo’s “Mercy Watson” series for grades kindergarten through two.

Sue Monk Kidd’s Essays on God

Chicken soup for the soul of fans of The Secret Life of Bees

Firstlight: The Early Inspirational Writings of Sue Monk Kidd. By Sue Monk Kidd. GuidepostsBooks, 227 pp., $19.95.

By Janice Harayda

“Inspirational” is often a publishing industry code for “wacko.” In the spirituality section of your local bookstore, you may find books about UFOs, magic mushrooms, sacred-conspiracy theories — almost anything except traditional religious beliefs. The writing in some of these books doesn’t “inspire” anything except a trip to the paper-shredder.

Firstlight is a lovely exception. Novelist Sue Monk Kid began her literary career by writing personal essays and vignettes for Guideposts, an interfaith magazine with a Christian focus. And she has collected some of those pieces and others in a book divided into sections on topics such as solitude, compassion, and finding the sacred in the ordinary.

Guideposts magazine offers what you might call “Christianity lite” – no heavy theological discourse — and that’s what you get here. Many of the entries in Firstlight are short enough that they could have appeared in books in the popular “Chicken Soup” series. Some have a tidied-up air – they aren’t as messy as life – or deliver a clichéd moral such as, “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,” or “God doesn’t always answer prayers as we expect.”

But Firstlight still has much offer to groups that include book clubs that have selected its author’s The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair. In some of her best essays, Kidd writes about her decision to give up nursing and become a writer after reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain at the age of 29. In others she writes about a struggle with perfectionism that once reduced her to taking “blue tranquilizers to get through the day.” And even atheists in book clubs may be moved by her poignant stories of her grandmother, who died at the age of 98. Kidd writes that on the day her grandmother died, her mother found a piece of paper beside her bed that said: “May I wake ready for that daily, yet greatest of all gifts – a fresh start.”

Best line: Kidd writes about visiting the Abbey of Gethsemani, a monastery in Kentucky: “Even though I yearn for this acre of solitude, some other part of me hungers for the larger world of ‘relevance,’ as if my solitude were a rarefied form of loitering.”

Worst line: At times, Kidd stops just short of talking about her “inner child.” She writes about “the inner divine,” “the inner Beloved,” and “the inner story” that each of us knows.

Recommended if … you’re looking for background on Kidd or intelligent but easy-to-read meditations on Christianity. Firstlight could make a good Lenten study text for church women’s groups after it comes out in paperback (though the publisher doesn’t say when this might occur).

Published: October 2006.

Links: www.suemonkkidd.com

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Hannibal Falling

Thomas Harris cannibalizes the English language … and guess what else?

Hannibal Rising: A Novel. By Thomas Harris. Delacorte, 323 pp., $27.95.

By Janice Harayda

Nobody sold out his fans more ruthlessly in 2006 than Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs and other books about the cannibalistic sociopath Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal’s depravity has always defied explanation. And his creator’s attempt to rationalize the savagery in this novel shows unmatched obtuseness even in a year full of news reports about O.J. Simpson’s cancelled If I Did It. Harris tries to account for Hannibal’s actions by describing his war-ravaged childhood in Lithuania. It’s like trying to explain why King Kong carried a terrified woman to the top of the Empire State Building by telling you what happened to the ape when he was a baby gorilla.

Hannibal Rising asks you to find entertainment in this premise: Not only did the Nazis have gas chambers, they created Hannibal by eating his baby sister when food ran low. The novel appropriates the horrors of the Third Reich in a much more offensive way than did the comedy The Producers in its film and stage versions. The Producers acknowledged that nothing could be worse than making light of Hitler’s atrocities. Harris never does this but tells his story straight up and in the pretentious literary style of a creative writing student who is about to get handed a “Drop” card by the professor. He saddles his novel with tedious italicized flashbacks, self-conscious present-tense narration, and cannibalized verb-less sentences. The dialogue is ludicrously stilted. An uncle tells Hannibal, “Our family, we are somewhat unusual people, Hannibal.” So that explains why Hannibal cut off the face of a captor and used it to escape in The Silence of the Lambs!

When it isn’t trivializing the Nazis, Hannibal Rising exploits the stereotype of the subservience of Japanese women and panders to male sexual fantasies of it. Hannibal finds a protector in Lady Murasaki, a namesake of the author of The Tale of Genji, who takes long, gardenia-scented baths. Lady Murasaki stands by Hannibal even after he has decapitated his first victim. An implicit message: Other female companions would run from this man as fast as they could, but a Japanese woman might be dumb enough to stick around. After all of this, you wonder what Harris will ask us to accept next: Maybe a porn film full of women women flock to Hannibal because they find cannibalism a turn-on?

Best line: None.

Worst Line: Let’s skip the mangled French, the pop psychology, and the scene in which Hannibal eats a shish kabob made from the flesh of a victim. Let’s look instead at the florid and ungrammatical overwriting, such as: “Hannibal walked Lady Murasaki to her very chamber door …. ” And: “The moonlight diffused by the wavy, bubbled window glass creeps across Hannibal’s face and inches silent up the wall.”

Published: December 2006

Furthermore: Hannibal Rising was named one of the five worst books of 2006 by Entertainment Weekly www.ew.com in the special year-end double issue dated Dec. 25/Jan. 5, 2006.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.